"It is high time
to unlearn the nowtraditional image of the infra- and
supra-structure.
Without transcendence,there is no life."

I propose to speak
here of the future, with all of the risks that doing
so involves.(1) I
will not venture any conjectures about what the
future might hold, that is, about future events. I
will simply ask under what conditions there can be a
future in the first place. Now, the first condition
is that there be people to live in it. I will ask,
then, what conditions have to be fulfilled in order
to ensure the population of the future.

Implosion?

I will be obliged to
venture beyond my field of expertise into the domain
of demography. I will rely on the work of others who
are, or at least have seemed to be, competent in it.
In order to avoid polemics, I will refrain from
citing living authors. In any case, I will do no
more than swerve briefly into demography before
regaining the safe road on which I can move ahead at
my ease.

About 30 years ago,
we started hearing about the so-called
"population explosion." As far as I can
tell, the term was introduced to the public in
Boston, Massachusetts on August 28, 1968--not by a
demographer, but by the American sociologist Philip
M. Hauser in the opening address of a convention of
sociologists. Hauser listed what he called the
"population explosion" among four causes
that, in his view, were revolutionizing the
"morphology" of society. By
"population explosion," Hauser meant
"the remarkable increase in the growth rate of
the world's population, especially during the three
centuries of the modern era."(2)
Hauser's term has been prodigiously successful since
its 1968 debut. It has even achieved the status of a
commonplace. The only problem is that professional
demographers have known all along that it is false.
More and more of them, in fact, are coming to the
conclusion that it is actually the opposite of the
truth. Today, the idea of a "population
explosion" is a dead letter--except among a few
intellectual stragglers.

The currently
dominant model envisages a classic demographic shift
caused not only by declining mortality rates, but
also by declining birth rates. Large numbers of
children are no longer needed to guarantee the
replenishment of the human species from one
generation to the next. The third world appears to
be exploding only because it has abruptly undergone
a process that in Europe could go almost unnoticed
because it occurred there slowly over a period of
centuries. The arrival of doctors and medicines from
Europe has caused a sharp drop in infant mortality,
and the local populations are still in the midst of
adjusting, that is, lowering, their birth rates to
reflect their actual needs. The world's population
will eventually level off at a rate of 2.1 children
per woman to about 10 billion people.

This is the official
model of the United Nations. It is also the most
wide-spread model, the one that most international
organizations endorse, finance, and publicize. Yet
it is not the only possible model, and there are
some population experts who contest it. In what
follows, I take my bearings from a now classic 1988
article by Jean Bourgeois-Pichat, who at that time
was director of the French government's Institut
national d'études démographiques [National
Institute of Population Studies]. Having reached the
height of his career and the end of his life (he
would die in 1991), Bourgeois-Pichat cooly sums up
in a rather technical, little publicized journal,
his outlook on the future--which he seasons at the
end with a dash of science fiction. Bourgeois-Pichat
states that European birth rates seem to be sinking
permanently below the minimum needed to replenish
the population from generation to generation.
Indeed, he goes so far as to speak, not of a
"population explosion," but of its precise
opposite: A population implosion.(3)

The idea of a decline
in population has been in the air ever since. It
turns up even among level-headed, not easily excited
people like Raymond Aron, who wrote in his 1983
memoirs that "Europeans are committing suicide
by declining birth rates."(4)
The politicians have also picked it up. In a speech
dating from his term as prime minister [of France],
Michel Rocard put the question like this: "Most
Western European states are committing demographic
suicide without even realizing it."(5) The last president
of the Republic echoed him not long afterwards. It
is worth pointing out that most politicians give the
same speech before family lobbies in an election
year as a kind of preparation for doing nothing
about the problem once they are voted into office.

To be sure, Europe's
population is still growing, but the growth rate is
gradually slowing. This trend will probably continue
until some time between the years 2030 and 2050.
What will happen then is, of course, anyone's guess,
but it looks as though the population will begin to
decrease. We do not know how fast. Going by the
statistics for Germany, the most populous and most
advanced country in Europe, we can confidently
predict the disappearance of the peoples of Europe
by around 2050. At any rate, 2050 is the date
forecast, without any hint of hysteria, by Jean
Bourgeois-Pichat.

The Barbarians

Are we about to be
overwhelmed, then, by a flood of barbarian invaders?
This is a fantasy, but it is a plausible one. It
would not be the first time that a civilization
disappeared in such a way. The fall of the Roman
Empire, as everyone knows, is one of the
foundational traumas of Western history. So much so,
in fact, that, as Tocqueville puts it, "we are
perhaps too inclined to believe that civilization
could not die in any other way."(6)
Yet one of the most plausible explanations of the
fall of Rome is the scarcity of human material, what
the ancients themselves called "oliganthropy."
This hypothesis was defended by, among others, Max
Weber.(7) The
so-called "barbarian invasions" resulted,
in part, from the suction effect created by the
Empire's population vacuum.

Yet we need not look
at this process, as we all too often do, only from
the point of view of the invaded. The ancient world
was rejuvenated by the so-called "barbarian
invasions," for which I would like to find
another term. For one thing, "barbarian"
is a loaded word that reflects Greek and Roman
prejudices. Moreover, it seems that these
"invasions" were really injections, an
influx of new blood, a transfusion that restored
life to an anemic organism.

One might wish that
something similar would happen to the tired West.
Besides, the barbarians who would be most likely to
sweep through us are really not so bad. Neither, for
that matter, were the barbarians of antiquity. There
are cases of Roman peasants who emigrated to
barbarian territory in order to escape the
intolerable pressure of what had become a despotic
state.(8) On balance,
does the West have much reason to boast? In a word,
hasn't the West had its day?

I return, then, to my
question: Are we going to be overwhelmed?
Unfortunately, no. There is no hope of that. For the
problem is that barbarians are rather hard to come
by these days. The regions of the world from which
one might expect an influx of people are themselves
undergoing a drop in population. Certain areas, such
as north eastern Brasil, which not long ago seemed
on the verge of becoming human anthills, are now
rapidly bleeding people. We are beginning to realize
that earlier demographic statistics were
considerably inflated. Not long ago, it was
generally estimated that Nigeria would have 120
million inhabitants by the year 2000. The first
reliable census, which was taken in 1991, before the
current civil war, speaks of 88 million.

The most that can be
hoped for--or feared--is that part of the population
of the third world will eventually settle in the
North of the planet. But, if the rest of the world
imitates the West, this resettlement will bring only
a temporary reversal. According to Bourgeois-Pichat,
it will take only a bit longer for the entire human
race to disappear, an event which he places
somewhere around the year 2400.

At this point, I
leave demographic conjecture behind. I must confess
to a certain relief, first, because demography is
not my area of expertise, second, because even an
amateur's brief foray is enough to convince me that
it is a minefield, where facts and arguments are
often overdetermined by political accusations and
taboos, in short, by disputes among persons and
institutions. I will thus consider what I have
reported so far as a hypothetical basis for a few
thought experiments that I would now like to
conduct.

The Children of Mohammed and the Children of
Maurice

What, then, is to
keep the rest of the world from following the West
so to say on its path to extinction? Television
series from the West have spread the image of the
two-child family and the carefree singles across the
globe. Yet the West has spread not only second rate
entertainment, but also, among other things, longer
life expectancy, decline in infant mortality, more
time set aside to education, greater participation
of women in the professions and in public life, and
so forth--things, in other words, that it is hard to
deny are goods.

In 1997, "SOS
Racisme" [Help, Racism!] designed a poster
inviting the average Frenchman to think about
immigration. The poster represented its target
audience with a name that, one must say, was
brilliantly chosen: The typically French name
"Maurice." The main text read as follows:
"If Mohammed didn't have children, Maurice
wouldn't have a pension." The subtitle made the
point clear: "Starting in the year 2000, the
children of immigrants will be major contributors to
everyone's retirement fund." The aim of the
poster, of course, was to combat what Jean-Pierre
Chevènement had awkwardly called a "national
preference." Despite its excellent intentions,
the poster did a wonderful job of letting the cat
out of the bag and cast a harsh light on a rather
sordid economic fact: Immigration pays. It imports
workers without charging the host country a penny
for their upbringing and education.

The problem is that
Mohammed is no idiot. And that he knows full well
what Maurice expects of him--to raise his children
and put them to work. Mohammed's children are
supposed to work to support Maurice in his
comfortable retirement home. We should not be
surprised, then, if Mohammed is reluctant to bring
children into the world for so noble a calling and
if immigrant families eventually become as small as
those of so-called "native stock."

Let us return to our
European societies, to Maurice and to his children.
How can we hold it against these children if they
are unfruitful? How can we blame the generations
that are capable of reproducing? Our societies ought
to encourage the young in this direction. Yet this
is precisely what our societies do not do.
Young people enter the work force late, and their
professional life begins [at least in Europe] with
temporary internships and the threat of
unemployment. Once they do have some job security,
they are under such intense pressure that they
simply have no time for children. This is bound to
discourage them from starting families, quite apart
from the many other economic and psychological
factors that are in play. And this is only
reinforced by the less than positive portrayal of
the family in certain of the media. But, in the end,
why would we help young people to start families? In
order to do that, we would have to redistribute
social wealth in their favor. Such a "new
deal" is hardly likely. In fact, what is much
more likely is the opposite.

The fact of the
matter is that the greying of the population
triggers a multiplier effect.(9)
On the whole, the generation that has children is
between 20 and 40 years old. The under 20's, the
children, do not yet have a vote. Retirees, ranging
from 60 to 70 years old, enjoy a big share of the
wealth, but have less influence. The
decision-makers, the ones who hold the reins of
power in the economy, finance, the media, and so on
are, on the whole, between the age of 35-40 and the
age of retirement. And their power only increases
with age. Society is controlled by people between 50
and 70 years old. The balance of social power is
tilted in their favor.

As for political
power, it rests on the principle of "one man,
one vote," which is blind to the voter's age.
Yet the average age of French voters is around 50.
And it is steadily rising.

When it comes time to
make decisions affecting the distribution of social
wealth, then, it is a safe bet that the decision
makers will favor two age groups: Theirs and the
group following theirs, into which they feel
themselves being pulled. The part that goes to young
families will thus be diminished in order to benefit
the retired. Our society is based on the alliance of
the middle aged and the old against the children.

One feels tempted to
inveigh against this tendency: What selfishness,
etc. I feel this temptation myself, all the more
because, if I succumbed to it, I would at least have
the decency not to beat someone else's breast. The
generation that stands accused is my own, the
generation of the baby-boomers, of the children of
'68--now 30 years older and in control of society.

Democracy and Demographics

I will therefore
restrain myself and ask instead a question that goes
to the heart of the matter: What right do we have to
protest? Isn't this system perfectly legitimate?
Retired people vote, children, and, a fortiori,
the unborn, do not. How could it be otherwise? This
system is inevitable given the reality of democracy.
We have no choice but to take care of those who are
alive. We have no choice but to take thought for the
present.

We can even say that
this system is a direct consequence of the
democratic ideal itself. Democracy entrusts the
decisions to an assembly of voters. But, at the very
least, voters have to exist. What entitles us, then,
to deprive already existing people of the
satisfaction of their legitimate needs in order to
bring into being not yet existing people? By what
right do we privilege nothing over being? With these
questions, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst
of a metaphysical discussion. . . .

In a famous passage,
Kant says that the problem of building a state is
perfectly soluble, even for a race of demons, so
long as the demons are intelligent.(10)
Allow me to go one step further. The problem of
building a state is even easier for demons than it
is for human beings, because, as theology teaches
us, the demons are spiritual creatures who do not
need to reproduce themselves. We human beings, on
the other hand, can survive as a species only by
reproducing ourselves. We need to replace the dead
by bringing into the world individuals who did not
exist before.

Everyone will admit
that, in practice, our democracies are not perfect.
But I have no objection to democracy as such. I have
difficulty imagining a better regime. Democracy is
the best means for ensuring the coexistence of
already living people. But democracy does not say
anything, cannot say anything, has no right to say
anything about people who do not yet exist.
Democracy has only one defect: Left to itself, its
logic leads, in the long run, to the extinction of
the human race.

Tocqueville already
saw quite clearly, among other things, democracy's
tendency to concentrate exclusively on the present.
He saw with equal clarity where this tendency would
lead, and he informs us in his usual discreet
fashion. Democracy, says Tocqueville, erases both
the past and the future: "Democracy not only
makes each man forget his ancestors, but it also
conceals from him his own posterity."(11) Tocqueville links
this tendency to the erasure of religious
convictions:

Once they [human beings] have accustomed themselves
to disregarding what will happen to them after their
life, one sees them relapse effortlessly into this
complete and bestial indifference towards the future
which accords all too well with certain instincts of
the human species. As soon as they have lost the
habit of setting their chief hopes upon the long
term, their natural inclination is to wish to
fulfill their desires instantaneously, and it seems
that, once they despair of living for ever, they are
ready to act as if they would exist for only a day.(12)

The Dying of the Lights

I said just now that
I can think of no better regime than democracy, and
I stand by my statement. But I would like to point
out that the meaning of "democracy" is
often overdetermined by a project frequently
identified with modernity itself, namely, the claim
to total autonomy with respect to any form of
transcendence. Has the time come to realize the
failure of this project?

Bourgeois-Pichat
borrows a simile from astronomy. Think of the whole
history of humanity, starting with the first humans
around 600,000 years ago:

The arc terminating in the third outcome that we
have indicated--the outcome we labeled
"catastrophe"--describes a trajectory
somewhat similar to the life of a star. After having
shone modestly for millions, or indeed, billions, of
years, a star abruptly becomes many times brighter,
and the astronomers then call it a supernova. But
the phenomenon is short-lived. The star quickly dies
out and literally collapses upon itself, although we
do not know for certain what happens in this final
stage. As far as the astronomers are concerned, the
star no longer exists.(13)

The image is superb. It is also ironic. The
appearance of novae at the end of the sixteenth
century was among the heralds of a New Era and was
perceived as such by the people of the time. Might
not modernity, res novae, be one of
Bourgeois-Pichat's stars?

We are here to speak
of the future of Christianity. On that score, there
need be no anxiety. It is rather the future of
humanity that seems to be gravely at risk. Let us
suppose that humanity is going to disappear. Who
would be embarrassed by this outcome? Christians
could always update an old idea that was sketched in
the Book of Revelation and systematically developed
by the Fathers and the Mediaevals.(14)
They could say, in substance, that the universe is a
factory for making holiness and must therefore shut
down once it has delivered the number of saints
determined by divine plan. And it may well be that
this number has already been reached.

The
"humanists," on the other hand, ought to
be very troubled. If you think that all five acts
are performed in this life, you have no other scene
to look forward to. Diderot says "the
philosopher thinks of posterity as the believer
thinks of the other world."(15)
But what good is this if there is no posterity?

Even if the
non-European peoples succeed us, they, too, will
disappear. The question, then, is whether the
Enlightenment is lethal. Must we wish that the other
civilizations will not imitate us? That
they will remain un-enlightened? Anyone who has read
[French] political science dissertations is familiar
with Valéry's inevitable line about civilizations
that know they are mortal. It would behoove us to
ask whether the adjective "mortal" should
not be given a new meaning. As Valéry uses the
word, it means "able to die." But we also
know that there is such a thing as a mortal poison
or a mortal illness. Might not Western civilization
be mortal, that is, lethal?

If so, then we have
to agree with those both inside and outside Europe
who reject progress. The fact of the matter is that
the peoples not infected with the virus of modernity
(which I would like to call "modernity"
here) are the ones who are having children. The
demographic weakness of the developed countries
gives ammunition to those both inside and outside
Europe who resist modernization. The prospect of a
world populated by integralist Catholics, Taliban-style
Muslims, and ultra-orthodox Jews does not exactly
correspond to our ideal future. But it just may be
the logical outcome of certain of our practices.

Metaphysics as an Infrastructure

What are the
psychological motives behind these practices? We
know little about what motivates couples to want
children or to restrict their number. We do not
know, for example, why, around 1770, the French
began to limit births--yet this was a major event
that, among others, explains why English is the
dominant language in the world today. There is,
however, one author who seems to me to have said
something very plausible about the ultimate
psychological motivation for reproduction: the
fourteenth-century Tunisian Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun
asks what causes conquered peoples to disappear. His
answer: discouragement. A people that has lost heart
stops reproducing. Hope literally gives life. More
precisely, "reproduction and fecundating
activity [iÿtimar] come only from the
intensity of hope [Êiddatu l-amal] and the
liveliness [naëað] that it generates in
the animal powers."(16)
There is, then, a virtuous circle in which hope is
produced by the image of a radiant future, while
there is a future because there is hope. We have to
reverse the old proverb: Where there is hope, there
is life.

Why should we hope,
why should we continue the human species? The
question may seem otiose. And it might have been for
Ibn Khaldun and for Tocqueville. It is less and less
so for us. It was certainly no longer so for Renan,
who devotes a long passage in the first of his Dialogues
philosophiques to answering it. Nature, he
says, dupes individuals for the sake of an interest
that is bigger than they are, namely, generation.
The universe is a deceitful tyrant. The interests of
humanity require certain prejudices, and among them
family spirit has pride of place. For Renan, we must
simultaneously see through this trickery and submit
to it.(17) I confess
that I am not altogether inclined to bet on this
latter formula. But even if it were plausible, could
it ever oblige someone else? We are, like it or not,
already embarked upon life. We enjoy it as an
"acquired asset," but we likewise suffer
its dark, not to say, horrible, aspects. But do we
have the right to bring new beings into it if we
cannot ask their opinion beforehand?

We have this right
if, and only if, we can affirm that life is a good
in itself, an absolute good, not only for those who
are already alive, but also for those who are not
yet among the living. According to Nietzsche, we can
indeed affirm that life is a good for those who are
already alive; we need only adopt the stand-point of
Dionysus. This stand-point is, once again, that of a
god, not of a human being. What Kant's fallen angels
or Nietzsche's Greek gods can do without effort is
less easy for human beings. . . . In any case, even
supposing that we can take up this point of view, we
cannot impose it on anyone else. But the question
is: Is life's goodness such that we can justifiably
inflict it on our neighbor? We cannot do that, in
the last analysis, without something like a
metaphysical anchoring.

In saying this, we
turn a very common way of looking at things on its
head. It is the metaphysical that founds the
natural, the physical. It is high time to unlearn
the now traditional image of the infra- and
superstructure. Without transcendence, there is no
life. We can also turn Nietzsche's formulas on their
heads. We needn't say that transcendence judges or
condemns life simply because it compares life to,
and measures it by, something else.(18)
The question is not whether we ought to prefer
immanence to transcendence. As if we had a choice!
Immanence has an internal tendency towards
self-destruction. There is a logic at work in the
relation between immanence and transcendence.

I could cite
Nietzsche again or refer to Malraux's saying about
the death of man as the inevitable consequence of
the death of God--a formula that has been repeated
ever since Malraux penned it.(19)
I will finish instead with an image. I spoke above
of an ad. My concluding image comes from another,
even more famous, ad, or rather, series of ads,
which showed a young woman at the bath who, week
after week, would progressively reveal her
endowments. The same applies to the relation between
immanence and transcendence: If I take off the top,
I also have to take off the bottom. Perhaps we are
living in something like the week's interval between
one revelation and the next, and perhaps we have to
expect that history, too, will, shall we say . . .
turn her back to us.--Translated by Adrian
Walker

Rémi
Brague, married with four children, is
professor of philosophy at the Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne).

1. [The
text published here reproduces a talk given at the
Sorbonne on November 25, 1999 within the context of
a conference entitled: "2000 ans après
quoi?" (2000 years after what?).--Tr.]

3. J.
Bourgeois-Pichat, "Du Xxe au XXIe siècle:
l'Europe et sa population après l'an 2000," in
Population (1988): 9-44; citation 16.
Hauser also speaks of a "population
implosion" ("The Chaotic Society,"
4a), but in an entirely different sense: "The
increased concentration of world population on a
small proportion of the earth's surface--the
phenomenon of urbanization and metropolization."